Jeff Wagner, Partner Technology Strategist

With the pace of innovation in the Cloud, it’s hard to keep up with what’s new across the entire Microsoft Azure platform. Let’s pause and take a moment to see what’s new—and coming soon—specifically with Azure Infrastructure as a Server (IaaS). IaaS typically focuses on compute, networking, and storage, or what I call the CNS or Central Nervous System of Microsoft Azure. Why focus on IaaS? Isn’t that old school tech given the release of containers and serverless? Well, according to Gartner, IaaS is going to be a $71.5 Billion dollar market in 2020, up from $45.5 Billion today. The adoption of IaaS is becoming increasingly mainstream.

Ok, back to Azure. We’re now up to 42 regions and more coming. There’s over 100 ExpressRoute partners and 130+ Microsoft Edge sites. Growth has been staggering. We now deploy more cores per week than what we did the entire first six months of Microsoft Windows Azure. Let’s look under the covers.

Compute

Azure now has compute options for all types of applications and sizes:

Entry level A size VMs

General purpose Dv3 VMs that can have up to 64 vCPUs and 256GB RAM

Large M series with 128 vCPUs and 4TB RAM

We’ve got you covered at any size. We also have improved our resiliency and offer an industry-leading high availability SLA of 99.99% when you place your VMs in Availability Zones. That’s no more than 4 minutes, 23 seconds of downtime per month or 8.6 seconds per day.

Network

Microsoft has one of the largest private networks in the world and it’s growing every day. We now have over 33,000 miles of lit fiber and our backbone speed in Microsoft Azure is 72 TB per second. With our new Accelerated Networking feature, you can see 30 Gbps of network bandwidth between VMs within a Region. The new generation of VPN gateways offer a 99.95% SLA with throughput of up to 1.25 Gbps.

Storage

Durability

We have an industry leading 0% annual failure rate. Even with LRS storage, there are 3 replicas of your data, so losing a drive is not a big deal to us.

Speed

We are speed. We’re down to <1ms latency for cached operations and offer up to 160,000 IOPS for blob caching. Max disk size is now up to 4 TB with 32 TB on the roadmap.